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graffiti

A friend just emailed us a link to this collection of awesome (and dirty!) graffiti from Pompeii. We know it seems like it couldn’t possibly be real, but Pompeiana.org seems like a legitimate academic site. (They describe themselves as “an online resource for all things Pompeian… a place for original research by scholars in the fields of art, archaeology, architecture and classics.” And the site is packed with stuffy academic papers — seems like an awful lot of work to go to for a prank.) And besides, Pompeii is known for its phallic and erotic artifacts (and, we suppose now, its poop jokes).

I was blown away when I first saw this photo. I thought the clever imagery was absolutely brilliant, but I suspected it was probably too good to be true and Photoshop had to be involved. It turns out some things that are too good to be true can actually be true. An anonymous group of guerrilla artists rappelled down the wall back in September to paint this environmentally conscious, large-scale mark on the 200 foot Matilija Dam in Ventura County.

Although they’re primitive and rudimentary in design (not that I could ever make such a thing) built with household object àla Make, Japanese artists So Kanno and Takahiro Yamaguchi are the creators behind what they call the “Senseless Drawing Bot.” Reflecting the artists’ interests in typography, from the formal (calligraphy) to the recent (graffiti), they built and programmed a robot that merges these forms.

Art collective Everfresh Studio built this tongue-in-cheek service van outfitted with all the gear and material, such as spray paint, masks, ropes, wire cutters necessary for a team to infiltrate and graffiti bomb a neighborhood. The van is also outfitted with a boombox to provide the accompanying soundtrack. [Via]

From the annals of street and graffiti art history is this old 8-minute video profile of artist Keith Haring during his pop culture ascendancy, including interviews with the artist and his dealer Tony Shafrazi (along with representing countless other artists, he also incidentally gained infamy for once spray painting in an act of protest “Kill…

This Minneapolis billboard promoting a traveling exhibition of Titian paintings from the National Gallery of Scotland which opened this month at the Minneapolis Institute of Art demonstrates that graffiti bombers and museum officials both have a sense of humor. The museum staff found it amusing and wanted it left up, but unfortunately the billboard company…

By the looks of this photo posted at Unseen NYC (a nice photoblog of random graffiti and seedier spottings in NYC), it looks like the Ghostbusters’ business shift to animal control isn’t going too well. This car was spotted in my old neighborhood of Park Slope.

Tumblingerstraße from yo man on Vimeo. This is an impressive stop-motion video using miniature toy cars and figures to create a scale model of Tumblingerstraße, which is a street in Munich where graffiti is legally permitted. A hipster Ken could hang out on this street.

Freddie Wong created this short yet exciting action sequence titled “Light Warfare” using stop-motion light painting. Only photons were hurt in the making of this short film, which took Wong and company a total of 13 hours over two days to shoot. Watch the behind the scenes video here. [Via]

As someone who loves and appreciates street art I have to say it is rare these days when graffiti moves me. Maybe it is just living in a city like New York. We’re inundated daily with it on building sides and subway platforms. It’s become part of the city’s landscape. With that said I could…

“Mac and Retna are unlikely partners. Mac is a photorealist, Retna is all brush.” More unlikely still is the fact that their giant murals, usually the stuff of city streets, have been popping up in places like Art Basel, Miami and on September 26th at the Robert Berman Gallery in Los Angeles. While the photorealism…

Life imitates art: Street graffiti and tags and subsequent efforts to paint over them inadvertantly results in an effect that mimics or resonates with Mark Rothko’s iconic “multiform” aesthetic. View the entire photo set here.

In “Graffiti Taxonomy,” Evan Roth ambitiously photographed and documented over 2,400 graffiti tags from each of Paris’s 20 districts, then archived and categorized them by letter. The artist tackled a smaller scale version as a Parsons graduate student in New York City where he “created character studies of the letter ‘S’ from the Lower East Side and the letter ‘A’ from Harlem, followed by an NYC-based letter ‘E’ study in 2008.”

I announced here a couple days ago about the opening of anonymously renowned street artist Banksy’s latest show, which also happens to be his largest exhibition yet, “Banksy Versus Bristol Museum” at the Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery in Bristol, England.

New York artist Ellis Gallagher’s latest graffiti technique is sure to please any pyromaniac. He is showing currently, along with other blog-worthy street artists including Poster Boy at the “Hollowood” show in West Hollywood’s Carmichael Gallery until the end of April. LAers, go check it out. It’s a bit dated, but I still really like…

A Barcelona-based group of subversive art-activists, Difusor took it upon themselves to give a decaying bunker from the Spanish Civil War era a face lift with pink camouflage. Rumor has it that Hello Kitty may be moving its operations there. View more photos of the bunker here. [Via]

An interesting tour of Sao Paulo’s streets and buildings led by Joao Wainer, who explains pixação, a form of graffiti unique to this region. The night vision shots of locals climbing buildings to leave their paint marks are particularly hair-raising. [Via]

Against the background of UNKLE’s emotive song “Heaven,” directors Spike Jonze and Ty Evans film the Lakai skateboarding team navigating an explosive terrain. The video starts a little slow, but “explodes” around the 1:58 mark. If that didn’t sell you then, let me try this: three words, skateboarding, explosions, and slo-mo. ‘Nuff said. [Via]